This is the archived SXSW 2012 schedule. Please see the current schedule here.

Crowdsourcing Cancer Support: A Love Story

#sxsw #cncrplooza

Cancer care and support is changing dramatically as blogging, social media, facebook and mmo gaming become mass media. Trisha Creekmore, aka Tinkerhell, a mother, wife and digital denizen since 1995, has had breast cancer twice. The first diagnosis in 2004 was hard and lonely. The second diagnosis in 2010 was harder, but not lonely. Trisha and her husband David found the content on health Web sites unhelpful and online disease-specific support groups depressing. So they made up their own plan, harnessing the power of facebook, the mmo Warhammer and thousands of strangers to create Cancerpalooza. David blogged every week. His plan was to keep family and friends informed, but the blog and the community it created became much more than the sum of their parts, inspiring and bringing value to complete strangers, the entire mmorpg community and even rockstars like Mike Patton and Ozzy Osbourne. But not in an annoying social-media-positive-sharing way. More in a FML-WTF-LOL way. This Future of Health Track is sponsored by Aetna.

Presenters

David CreekmoreCOOInternews

Trisha CreekmoreWriter/Interactive ProducerTink[erhell] Media

Trisha Creekmore has been an interactive producer since the stone age. She graduated from Columbia Journalism's first-ever new media class in 1995. Since then she's made websites for media companies such as Discovery Channel, PBS.org, TIME, Travel Channel, VOAnews.com, Science Channel and a bunch of sites that don't exist anymore. She currently writes and consults for interactive media, although she often sneaks off to play mmo games like Warhammer, Rift and Star Wars: The Old Republic.